Managing documents at home for serious leisure: a case study of the hobby of gourmet cooking

Information in the personal collections of writers and artists: Practices, challenges and preservation

This article presents findings from interviews with 18 writers and artists in New Zealand, whose lives and work have potential heritage value. The objective was to investigate the perceived value of participants’ personal collections, the relevant management practices and challenges, and their potential effects on preservation and (re)use. The findings provide a characterisation of the personal information management (PIM) practices of writers and artists, revealed challenges common to organising personal collections across time and devices as well as those caused or increased by the nature of writers’ and artists’ work, and produce insights into the impact of perceived collection value and PIM practices on future access, preservation and (re)use of such collections.

The potential of feminist technoscience for advancing research in information practice

Purpose

In this paper, we introduce feminist technoscience as an approach that will advance theory in information behavior and practice.

Design/methodology/approach

In this conceptual paper, we identify four common assumptions in information behavior and information practice research that limit theory development to date. Existing models and theories tend to rely on extractive logic, focus on a person-in-situation, depend on binary definitions and assume that information interaction changes people's lives for the better. This leads to extractive ways of discussing information interactions and limits our ability to fully theorize embodiment and affect in our discipline.

Findings

Feminist technoscience offers distinct ways of thinking about people, technology, bodies and power; in doing so, it responds to some perennial limitations in our research to date.

Originality/value

Feminist technoscience is a robust research paradigm that has not yet been fully applied in our discipline. Assumptions in information behavior and information practice research have led to models and theories that reflect a logic of extraction and are limited in their potential for characterizing both embodiment and affect. Feminist technoscience provides a way to conduct research that challenges these assumptions and addresses these limitations.

Information activities in serious leisure as a catalyst for self-actualisation and social engagement

Purpose

This paper reports findings from a research project about human information behaviour in the context of serious leisure. Various forms of information activities in this context have been identified and categorised to depict common patterns of information seeking, sharing, using and producing.

Design/methodology/approach

The project adopted a qualitative approach in an interpretive paradigm using a thematic analysis method. Data-collection technique was semi-structured interview and 20 volunteers were recruited via a maximum variation sampling strategy. The collected data was transcribed and thematically analysed to identify the main concepts and categories.

Findings

The participants have been experiencing six qualities of serious leisure during their long-term engagement with their hobbies or voluntary jobs and their experiences can be fully mapped onto the serious leisure perspective. The findings also confirmed serious leisure is a unique context in terms of the diversity of information activities embedded into a wide range of individual and collective actions in this context. Information seeking and sharing in serious leisure is not only a source of personal satisfaction for the participants, it also can provide them with a sense of purpose in a meaningful journey towards self-actualization and social inclusion.

Research limitations/implications

The generalisability of the findings needs to be examined in wider populations. Nonetheless, the existing findings can be useful for follow-up research in the area.

Practical implications

This study will be useful in both policy and practice levels. In the policy level, it will be beneficial for cultural policy makers to gain a better understanding about the nature of leisure activities. In the practice level, it will be helpful for serious leisure participants to understand the value of information seeking and sharing in their leisure endeavours. Also, information professionals can use it to enhance the quality of their services for the serious leisure participants who are usually among devoted patrons of libraries, museums, archives and galleries.

Social implications

Learning about serious leisure can provide new insights on people preferences in terms of choosing different entertaining and recreational pursuits – such as indoor and outdoor hobbies – in their free time.

Originality/value

The informational aspects of serious leisure is an emerging and evolving ground of research. This paper provides empirical evidence on this topic from a specific context in the regional areas in Australia.

“Write the story you want to read”: world-queering through slash fanfiction creation

Purpose

This pilot study explores how queer slash fanfiction writers reorient cis/heteronormative entertainment media (EM) content to create queer information worlds.

Design/methodology/approach

Constructivist grounded theory was employed to explore queer individuals' slash fanfiction reading and creation practices. Slash fanfiction refers to fan-written texts that recast cis/heteronormative content with queer characters, relationships, and themes. Theoretical sampling drove ten semi-structured interviews with queer slash writers and content analysis of both Captain America slash and material features found on two online fanfiction platforms, Archive of Our Own and fanfiction.net. “Queer” serves as a theoretical lens through which to explore non-cis/heteronormative perspectives on gender and sexuality.

Findings

Participants' interactions with and creation of slash fanfiction constitute world-queering practices wherein individuals reorient cis/heteronormative content, design systems, and form community while developing their identities over time. Findings suggest ways that queer creators respond to, challenge, and reorient cis/heteronormative narratives perpetuated by EM and other information sources, as well as ways their practices are constrained by structural power dynamics.

Research limitations/implications

This initial data collection only begins to explore the topic with ten interviews. The participant sample lacks racial diversity while the content sample focuses on one fandom. However, results suggest future directions for theoretical sampling that will continue to advance constructs developed from the data.

Originality/value

This research contributes to evolving perspectives on information creation and queer individuals' information practices. In particular, findings expand theoretical frameworks related to small worlds and ways in which members of marginalized populations grapple with exclusionary normativity.

Documentation in a community informatics project

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the creation and sharing of information by Bangladeshi women participants in a community informatics project and to assess to what extent the information provided to them meets their short and longer-term needs.

Design/methodology/approach

The analysis is based on data collected during a workshop with village women in Dhaka and focus group discussions in rural Bangladesh in March and April 2019. The information continuum model is used as a framework to analyse the data.

Findings

The study shows that the women document their learning and share it with their families and communities and that they are very conscious of the importance of keeping analogue back-ups of the information provided to them in digital format. They use notebooks to write down information that they find useful and they copy information provided to them on brown paper sheets hung in the village community houses.

Practical implications

This paper raises questions about how information is communicated to village women, organised and integrated in a community informatics project, and more generally about the suitability and sustainability of providing information in digital formats in a developing country.

Originality/value

The paper shows how village women participants in a community informatics project in Bangladesh took the initiative to create and preserve the information that was useful to them in analogue formats to remedy the limitations of the digital formats and to keep the information accessible in the longer term.

From health to performance

Purpose

Building on theoretical foundation of personal information management (PIM) in information science, this paper seeks to understand how activity tracker users manage their personal health information generated by their devices and to elucidate future activity tracking technology in support of personal health information management (PHIM). This paper aims to discuss this issue.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors conducted a web survey study with a specific group of activity tracker users – amateur runners. This survey collected both quantitative and qualitative data on participants’ engagement with activity tracking technology, their PHIM practices with the information generated by the technology and how their needs were being met by their activity tracking technology use and PHIM practices.

Findings

Amateur runners surveyed in this study exhibit long-term engagement and frequent interaction with activity tracking technology. They also engage in PHIM practices by using a range of PHIM tools and performing various PHIM activities. Furthermore, they use activity tracking technology and engage in PHIM practices to meet various health/fitness-related needs and information needs, while some of these needs such as performance needs and overarching needs are only partially met or unmet.

Originality/value

This research discusses amateur runners as power users of activity tracking technology, provides timely updates to PIM and PHIM research in light of a new type of personal health information, and generates design considerations for future activity tracking technology in support of PHIM. It also brings together previously disparate research regarding everyday life PHIM in information science, human–computer interaction and health informatics.

Bringing out the everyday in everyday information behavior

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to argue that scholars in the information behavior (IB) field should embrace the theoretical framework of the everyday to explore a more holistic view of IB.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper describes the theory of the everyday and delineates four opportunities offered by scholars of the everyday. The paper concludes with three examples that highlight what a more everyday-focused everyday information behavior might look like.

Findings

The theory of the everyday provides a useful theoretical framework to ground research addressing the everyday world as well as useful concepts for analysis and research methodology.

Originality/value

The theoretical framework of the everyday contributes to IB research by providing a theoretical justification for work addressing everyday life as well as useful concepts for analysis. The paper also outlines the benefits of integrating methods influenced by institutional ethnography, a methodology previously used to address the nuances of the everyday world.

Information repertoires: media use patterns in various gratification contexts

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to identify prominent patterns of media use across six media (e.g. television, social media, public libraries) and four gratification contexts (e.g. studying, leisure activities), and second, to investigate whether media use patterns vary with six individual characteristics by introducing the construct of information repertoire.

Design/methodology/approach

Data were collected through an online questionnaire completed by 811 adult internet users in the USA. Latent class analysis (LCA), including latent class regression, was performed to analyse the data.

Findings

The study found eight information repertoire profiles. The user characteristics associated with each profile, such as age, race and ethnicity, were identified. The profile with the most respondents was characterised by heavy use of TV and the internet for everyday leisure activities. Overall, the eight profiles do not show exclusive use of one or two media (such as a power-law pattern). However, the profiles do exhibit patterned behaviour, in which respondents use the same configuration of media in two or more gratification contexts. These findings suggest some level of gratification-based heuristic in media selection and use when respondents face contexts they deem to be similar.

Originality/value

In conceptual development, the study introduced the construct of information repertoire to capture media use profiles that account for multiple media use across multiple contexts. Methodologically, less-used LCA was applied, which allowed combining the 24 variables (6 media×4 gratification contexts) and the six demographic covariates in a single, unified analysis.

Getting-to-know

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the sociocultural underpinnings of wiki-based knowledge production in the videogame domain, and to elucidate how these underpinnings relate to the formation of wikis as resources of videogame documentation.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper is based on a three-month ethnographic investigation of knowledge practices on the Dark Souls Wiki (DSW). In focus of the analysis were the boundaries and knowledge aims of the DSW, together with how its contributors organized inquiries and used various sources, methods of investigation, and ways of warranting knowledge claims.

Findings

The principal result of the paper is an empirical account of how the DSW functions as a culture of knowledge production, and how the content and structure of the wiki connects to the knowledge practices of its contributors. Four major factors that influenced knowledge practices on the wiki were identified: the structures and practices established by the community’s earlier wiki efforts; principles and priorities that informed wiki knowledge practices; the characteristics of the videogame in focus of the site’s knowledge-building work; the extent and types of relevant documentation provided by videogame industry, the videogaming press included.

Originality/value

Previous research has shown interest in investigating the mechanisms by which community-created knowledge and online resources of documentation emerge, and how these are utilized in play. There is, however, little research seeking to elucidate the sociocultural structures and practices that determine and sustain collaborative online videogame knowledge production.

Information activities as serious leisure within the fanfiction community

Purpose

Fanfiction communities are actively engaged in creating cultural products. These large online communities have created and developed conventions that guide their solutions to gathering and presenting their work. The purpose of this paper is to investigate those conventions looking for evidence of information-related pursuits as serious leisure (SL) (Stebbins, 2007).

Design/methodology/approach

A diverse collection of fanfiction publishing platforms, blogs, and associated websites were subject to a qualitative inductive analysis (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). Platforms included both generalist sites like Archive of Our Own and more focused sites such as Teen Wolf Fic Finder.

Findings

Findings show significant information-related activities around collecting, wayfinding, and organizing. Collecting centers on platform policies focused on scope. Wayfinding relates to peer review as well as various reference-like work including reader’s advisory, reference questioning, and the creation of pathfinders. Organizing looks to the unique organizational schema created and used by the fanfiction communities.

Research limitations/implications

The authors explore implications of these activities in reference to the fanfiction community and the library and information science (LIS) discipline. The fanfiction community is shifting out of an ephemeral existence and into one of a more permanent digital heritage. Fanfiction is an SL pursuit that also has much to offer for consideration to the LIS discipline.

Practical implications

With respect to the wayfinding and organizing conventions of fanfiction communities, these activities provide librarianship with the opportunity to consider traditional activities in new ways.

Originality/value

Fanfiction is a little studied phenomenon in SL and in LIS. This research provides connections to both areas.

Towards an everyday life information literacy mind-set: a review of literature

Purpose

Information literacy (IL) within the everyday life context is regarded as an important condition for civic participation and engagement, informed citizenship, health and well-being. However, compared to the significant amount of IL research within educational and workplace settings, there has been relatively little research in relation to the value of IL within everyday life situations. The purpose of this paper is to explore existing empirical research that addresses aspects of IL within the context of everyday life, identifying current gaps in the literature, highlighting key theoretical positions, and mapping trends.

Design/methodology/approach

The review has been conducted in the form of a scoping study that aims to map the key concepts underpinning this research area and the main sources and types of evidence available. It is based on journal literature reporting primary research, published from 2000 to 2016 and sourced from a range of different databases covering IL research.

Findings

IL practices take place within diverse everyday life contexts. The key research directions have been categorised into four broad contextual areas, encompassing leisure and community activities, citizenship and the fulfilment of social roles, public health and critical life situations. These point to the need for developing an IL mind-set which is discussed as an adaptive, transferable and ongoing activity that transgresses the boundaries of prescribed skills within the specific contexts of work and education.

Originality/value

This research area is still in its infancy and more varied contexts need to be explored to nurture a robust understanding of the use and impact of IL in people’s everyday lives. The paper also highlights the implications of the lack of IL and identifies the key players in the advocacy of IL within different everyday life settings.

Australian motor sport enthusiasts’ leisure information behaviour

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore the leisure information behaviour of motor sport enthusiasts, examining: their information needs; their information seeking and sharing; what personal information they had; and their satisfaction with their information seeking and personal information management efforts.

Design/methodology/approach

This exploratory study examined participants’ information behaviour from a postpositivist and inductive research approach. An online survey was completed by 81 motor sport enthusiasts. The quantitative survey data were analysed using descriptive statistics, whilst the qualitative data were analysed using thematic coding.

Findings

The research findings highlighted that enthusiasts engaged in mixed serious leisure. They required information before, during and after race events, and sought this primarily from online sources, as well as from other individuals. Totally, 90 participants shared information about their interest in motor sport with family, friends and fellow enthusiasts, primarily via e-mails (69 per cent) and Facebook (49 per cent). They also gathered information about motor sport, including photographs and memorabilia. Participants were satisfied with their information management strategies for their personal collections.

Research limitations/implications

Participants were limited to motor sport enthusiasts in Australia, hence findings cannot be generalised more broadly.

Practical implications

Understandings of enthusiasts’ information behaviour provide information management professionals with insights to work with this user community.

Originality/value

This study fills a gap in the literature about leisure information behaviour of motor sport enthusiasts in Australia. It identifies and provides a typology of the 12 categories of information needed by enthusiasts. Provides a preliminary motor sport information behaviour model guided by the conceptual frameworks of the everyday life information seeking model; general models on information behaviour; and the information problem solving behaviour model.

‘Being in a knowledge space’: Information behaviour of cult media fan communities

This article describes the first two parts of a three-stage study investigating the information behaviour of fans and fan communities, focusing on fans of cult media. A literature analysis shows that information practices are an inherent and major part of fan activities, and that fans are practitioners of new forms of information consumption and production, showing sophisticated activities of information organisation and dissemination. A subsequent Delphi study, taking the novel form of a ‘serious leisure’ Delphi, in which the participants are not experts in the usual sense, identifies three aspects of fan information behaviour of particular interest beyond the fan context: information gatekeeping; classifying and tagging; and entrepreneurship and economic activity.

Reading as dialogical document work: possibilities for Library and Information Science

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to introduce a dialogically based theory of documentary practices and document work as a promising framework for studying activities that are often conceptualised as information behaviour or information practices within Library and Information Science (LIS).

Design/methodology/approach

– An empirical example – a lesson on how to read railway timetables – is presented. The lesson stems from a research project including 223 Swedish lessons recorded in Swedish primary schools 1967-1969. It is argued that this lesson, as many empirical situations within LIS research, can fruitfully be regarded as documentary practices which include document work such as reading, rather than instances of information behaviour.

Findings

– It is found that the theoretical perspective of dialogism could contribute to the theory development within LIS, and function as a bridge between different subfields such as reading studies and documentary practices.

Research limitations/implications

– The framework is yet to be applied on a larger scale. This would require a willingness to go beyond the entrenched idea of information as the core theoretical concept and empirical object of study within LIS.

Social implications

– The theoretical framework offers a view of the relations between individuals, documents, and social contexts, through which it is possible to explore the social significance of core LIS concerns such as reading, literacy, and document work.

Originality/value

– The theoretical framework offers an alternative to the monologist, information-based theories and models of people’s behaviours and practices prevalent in LIS.

Everyday life classification practices and technologies

Purpose

– Through the application of domain-analytic principles, the purpose of this paper is to explore how participants’ understandings of healthy eating are related to their grouping and classification of foods.

Design/methodology/approach

– In total, 30 food-interested people were asked to (1) sort a series of 56 statements about food, health, and eating on a scale from “most disagree” to “most agree”; (2)complete an open card sort of 50 foods; and (3) classify these 50 foods on a scale from “most unhealthy” to “most healthy”. Exercises (1) and (3) involved Q-methodology, which groups people who share similar understandings of a phenomenon.

Findings

– Participants’ understandings of healthy eating – revealed by the first Q-methodology exercise – were related to shared food priorities, values, and beliefs; these understandings were indirectly connected with food identities, which was not expected. This suggests that lay domain knowledge is difficult to capture and must involve other methodologies than those currently employed in domain-analytic research.

Research limitations/implications

– Although a small sample of food-interested people were recruited, the purpose of this study was not to make generalized claims about perspectives on healthy eating, but to explore how domain knowledge is related to everyday organizational processes.

Originality/value

– To “classify” in Library and Information Science (LIS) usually involves an engagement with formally established classification systems. In this paper the author suggests an alternative path for LIS scholars: the investigation of everyday life classification practices. Such an approach has value beyond the idiosyncratic, as the author discusses how these practices can inform LIS researchers’ strategies for augmenting the messages provided by static classification technologies.

Re-enactment and its information practices; tensions between the individual and the collective

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to explore the practices used by Australian re-enactors to achieve authenticity, a communally agreed measure of acceptability in the creation of an impression, the dress, behaviours and accoutrements of the period, through the concepts of serious leisure and information practices.

Design/methodology/approach

– Re-enactment is a practical, information-based performative activity. In this paper, the research styles and decision-making processes developed and employed by its enthusiasts to create authentic impressions are examined through an ethnographic case study.

Findings

– The re-enactors are identified as “makers and tinkerers”, in Stebbins’s categorisation of serious leisure. Research, documentation and the sharing of information, knowledge and skills are common practices among re-enactors and acknowledged as integral to the processes of creating an impression to a collectively agreed standard of authenticity. Re-enactors’ “making” includes not only the creation of the impression but also the documentation of their process of creating it. They prize individual knowledge and expertise and through this, seek to stand out from the collective.

Originality/value

– Although communities of re-enactors are often studied from a historical perspective, this may be the first time a study has been undertaken from an information studies perspective. The tension between the collective, social norms and standards that support the functioning of the group in understanding authenticity, and the expert amateur; the individual with specialist skills and talents, encourages a fuller investigation of the relationships between the individual and the collective in the context of information practices.

Documenting virtual world cultures

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to explore how virtual world communities employ new media as a repository to record information about their past.

Design/methodology/approach

– Using the notions of documentary practice and memory-making as a framework, a case study of MMORPG City of Heroes’ (CoH) virtual community on Reddit discussion board “/r/cityofheroes” was conducted. The study consists of an interpretative analysis of posts, comments, images, and other materials submitted to /r/cityofheroes during a period of approximately seven months.

Findings

– The principal finding of the study is that the CoH community, with varying levels of intentionality, documented a range of pasts on /r/cityofheroes, relating to CoH as a game world, a site of personal experience, a product, a nexus of narratives, and a game. The analysis also lays bare the community’s memory-making processes, in which the documented conceptions of CoH’s past were put to work in the present, informing community action and viewpoints.

Originality/value

– Games and gaming practices are increasingly prevalent in leisure and professional settings. This trend, which makes virtual environments and online media proxies for or augmentations of “real life”, makes it necessary for information scholars to understand how the full range of human information behaviours, including documenting, and memory-making, emerge or are replicated online. Additionally, few studies have examined the interplay between new media affordances, documentary practices, and memory-making in the context of virtual world communities.

How do people attempt to integrate the management of their paper and electronic documents?

Purpose

– This article aims to describe how people manage to integrate their use of paper and electronic documents in modern office work environments.

Design/methodology/approach

– An observational interview type study of 14 participants from 11 offices in eight organizations was conducted. Recorded data were analysed using a thematic analysis method. This involved reading and annotation of interview transcripts, categorizing, linking and connecting, corroborating, and producing an account of the study.

Findings

– The findings of the study can be categorized into four groups: the roles paper and electronic documents serve in today's offices, the ways in which these documents are managed, the problems associated with their management, and the types of fragmentation that exist in terms of their management and how these are dealt with.

Practical implications

– The study has identified the need for better integrated management of paper and electronic documents in present-day offices. The findings of the study have then been used to propose a set of guidelines for the development of integrated paper and electronic document management systems.

Originality/value

– Although similar studies of offices have been conducted in the past, almost all of these studies are prior to the widespread use of mobile and network-based shared technologies in office environments. Furthermore, previous studies have generally failed to identify and propose guidelines for integration of paper and electronic document management systems.

Interpreting reference work with contemporary practice theory

Purpose

In an increasingly competitive field of socially mediated information and knowledge available online, the public library's traditional services are increasingly questioned for relevancy. Drawing on the core premises of contemporary practice theory to ground the methodological and theoretical perspectives, the aim of this paper is to provide the initial “inside” view of traditional public library face‐to‐face reference work from a practice‐based perspective.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper includes an ethnographic case study of face‐to‐face reference service in four branches of one urban public library involving 170 hours of participant observation, 24 hours of unobtrusive observation, 480 reference interactions, and 28 participant interviews and analysis of policy documents.

Findings

This analysis highlights the structuring and mediating role of objects in the enactment of reference work. A practice‐based typology of reference interactions is introduced which characterizes the types of questions asked, knowledge processes in action, interpersonal communication style and mode of practice. The collective organizing actions of reference work are unpackaged in a non‐hierarchical or flattened plane that recognizes the key actors and dynamics of the practice as it endures across time and space.

Originality/value

Evidence and an approach are introduced to support re‐conceptualizing public library reference work as an epistemic practice.

Information in social practice: A practice approach to understanding information activities in personal photography

This theoretical paper explores the implications of adopting a practice approach in information science, proposing ‘information in social practice’ as an umbrella term in preference to ‘information behaviour’ or ‘information practice’. The paper explores one influential definition of practice and how four forms of personal photography would be understood within it. It shows that social practices often involve information activities such as seeking or managing information, although they are not the end of the practice. Information activities differ markedly between apparently similar practices; indeed conceptions of what information is are shaped by particular practices. This justifies examining information at the practice level. The focus in the practice approach on social convention and identity, materiality and embodiment, routine and change may also change how we look at information.